Re: free alternative acroread
> I really would like to use only free software, but unfortunately
> acroread has a feature I didn't find so far in free alternatives: The
> option "Fit to printable area" in the print dialogue.
[...]
> Is there any free pdf-reader with a similar option? Or, is there any
> easy way to achieve the same effect with free pdf-readers which don't
> have the option?
IIUC this feature scales&translates the document so as to minimize the
margin (and hence maximize the size of the printed text, without
cropping).
If that's the case, no I sadly don't know of a Free Software tool that
does that for you. But I routinely do it "by hand" (for 2-up printing,
in my case) with "pstops": I convert from PDF to PS, then run it through
pstops with some tentative scale&translate, run `gv' on the output and
then re-run pstops with different arguments (leaving `gv' refresh its
display on-the-fly) until I like what I see.
I would love to see a tool that does this automatically for me
(especially if it can do it for 2-up as well). Fundamentally, it
shouldn't be that hard. IIUC running the PS (or PDF) file through
"gs -dSAFER -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=bbox" should return the needed
info about area actual used by the document, after which it should be
easy to scale/translate/rotate to make it fit on a page of any
given size. But I never got around to trying it out.
Stefan
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